The pro and anti-Obamacare protesters at the the Supreme Court epitomize the ultimate divide in American politics.
Obamacare is dead; long live Obamacare. Or maybe not. Early in 2015, thanks to incessant conservative teeth gnashing, the Supreme Court will once again gird up its robe-covered loins to make a major ruling on Barack Obama’s signature law.
The plaintiffs in the upcoming King v. Burwell case claim that, according to the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) statute, the IRS exceeded the limits of its regulatory powers by allowing for both state-run AND federal exchanges. It’s a classic right-wing “states’ rights” argument. 22 states have already balked on setting up exchanges, and conservatives are betting that weeding out the federal cash that’s picking up the slack in red states will undermine the entire structure of Obamacare. No matter that blocking federal subsidies could yank insurance coverage away from upwards of 11.8 million people: after all, are there no prisons, no poorhouses?!
So while the current band of anarchist GOP homunculi certainly out-crazy their forefathers, the ideological struggle over universal health care is hardly new. In fact, it remains the most crucial dividing issue between the two major American political parties. In an era where both parties respond to the demands of oligarchs, liberals view equality (via equal access to health care) as necessary to expanding freedom; while conservatives believe that freedom can only be achieved via inequality. Indeed, as Corey Robin observes in The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, “[w]hat the conservative sees and dislikes in equality…is not a threat to freedom but its extension. For in that extension, he sees a loss of his own freedom.”*
I’ll explain further. But first, let’s recap of the fight for universal health care in America.
Back in 1912, Teddy Roosevelt proposed the idea of social insurance. But business interests and Roosevelt’s conservative opponents opposed any government intrusion in healthcare, an area where the private sector could reap huge profits. In 1933, as part of the New Deal, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared healthcare to be a right. Again, however, the American Medical Association (AMA) and Republicans fought back hard. In 1935, FDR succeeded in passing the Social Security Act, but only after a fight with right-wingers who, in their 1937 “Conservative Manifesto,” denounced the entire New Deal as creeping socialism.
Conservatives continued to oppose universal healthcare into the mid-twentieth century. Harry Truman’s plan to expand Social Security into a universal insurance program fell prey to Republican congressional victories in 1947. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson signed into law Medicare, a now-cherished single-payer insurance program for the elderly. Wingnuts of the time, such as then bad-actor Ronald Reagan — in a famous ad for the AMA — demagogued Medicare as a threat to freedom itself. In the face of these right-wing assaults, universal health coverage remained elusive.
In the 1960s, the Gipper said that Medicare would enslave Americans. He lied about that. He lied about a lot of things.
Then, in the gritty 1970s, conservatism began its near forty-year political dominance in the U.S. In a process described in detail by two recent studies: Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s Winner-Take-All Politics and Eric Alterman and Kevin Mattson’s The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama, the Democratic Party shifted rightward in order to keep pace with the country’s conservative political swing. Liberals faced the increased lobbying clout of a politically empowered and (thanks to globalization) geographically mobile business community that aligned itself with the GOP. Moreover, organized labor — liberalism’s traditional source of political muscle — declined in influence and power amid increasing global competition and a hostile domestic political environment. The Democratic Party had been the only institutional voice for liberalism, and when it lost its ability to speak to American pocketbooks, it scrambled to compete for the campaign funds that business groups poured into the GOP’s plutocrat-preferencing coffers. In short, beginning in the 1970s, Democrats became more like Republicans — even to the point of embracing the individual insurance mandate that originated as a paternalistic conservative scheme to force alleged freeloaders to buy health insurance under penalty of fine.
The Democrats’ rightward shift notwithstanding, they still support universal healthcare. Republicans, as the voice of an unhinged conservatism, oppose it. Thus, we arrive at the current schism over Obamacare. Despite Democrats’ and Republicans’ political resemblance, conservatives still oppose universal healthcare because they oppose the notion of equality. Corey Robin writes that conservatives see in equality the extension of freedom from the few to the many, which threatens the ruling power of the few, who tend to be conservatives.*
This is why America’s elite — banks, insurance companies, and the medical lobbies — rallied behind their GOP toadies (and corporate Democrats) in the fight to quash Obamacare. Universal health care ensures financial protection for workers in an economy where labor power has been destroyed and the business community domineers over the political system like the feudal lords of old. With universal health care, Americans become freer, more mobile, more secure individuals who are no longer beholden to their ever-more-powerful and miserly employers. The latter is a status preferred by conservatives who perceive any agency on the part of the lower orders as a threat to “natural” ruling hierarchies.
Millions of people will lose their health insurance if the Supreme Court further guts the ACA. Because freedom.
By contrast, liberals believe that individual freedom can only be achieved when people control their own destiny, free from the dictates of both the state and private interests. This is why, despite the Democrats’ rightward turn, they’ve nonetheless retained a belief in universal health care’s ability to expand freedom. The right wing cannot allow liberals to connect universal health care to individual freedom. Hence, the GOP’s kamikaze-style opposition to Obamacare.
Universal healthcare, then, remains the most important divide between the two modern American political parties. Conservatives know that if the ramparts fall on this issue, a political wedge they’ve exploited for a century will be destroyed. Thus, when looney toons like former Minnesota Rep. Michelle Bachmann claim that Obamacare will “get Americans addicted to the crack cocaine of dependency on more government health care,” they aren’t expressing concern for the health of average people. Rather, wingnuts know that if Obamacare helps Americans avoid health-related financial ruin, then conservatives will lose the ideological debate over whether universal health care expands or constrains individual freedom. This is why they’re obsessed with destroying Obamacare: the power of the ruling class demands such a feverish last stand.
* See Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 8.
“[Liberals] believe that individual freedom can only be achieved when people control their own destiny, free from the dictates of both the state and private interests.”
Conservatives. Conservatives believe this. American liberals clamor for government-mandated reform – the very antithesis of individual liberty.
Like women controlling their own bodies, people choosing to use recreational drugs, marrying whichever gender you prefer……
Which are issues for the people or – perhaps – the states. Definitely not the federal government.
Yes, but Obamacare, for all of its flaws, DID give the states states most of the power to set up their own exchanges. So what did conservative-controlled states do? They still either rejected the state plans or tried to distance themselves from the federal law that made more widespread insurance plans even possible. Yes, states are the laboratories of democracy, but I don’t buy the notion that the federal government should never have a role. Too often, eschewing so-called Big Government unleashes the tyrannies of local governments, which is usually how the Right likes it.
Liberals recognize that private interests will seize control of the state for their own use. If the people don’t make the government work for all, it will become a corporatocracy. Conservatives are quick to denounce the state but have no problem with private interests making peons of individuals. If you can’t afford health insurance, then you aren’t free. For conservatives, freedom only exists for a few: those who can afford it.
But before I wasn’t penalized for not having health insurance. Now I either have to buy something I cannot afford or pay a fine (tax, if you prefer) I cannot afford.
Indeed. That’s the best argument for single payer, Medicare for All, or whatever you want to call it.
I had to listen to my right wing brother-in-law run his ignorant drop out mouth yesterday while he brought up every talking point from FOX News. I brought up fact after fact and he just chose to ignore the facts by literally saying they weren’t not true. Then his son brought up something hilarious. He started going on and on about secret detention centers in the US and how they had playgrounds for kids where thousands of people were being detained. He showed me the picture on the Internet taken by a satellite. It was a military base….an actual US military base and the playground was the one at the school on base. They both refused to believe that and insisted that it was used to house thousands of illegals.
Both love the preppers and other idiot websites while they work minimum wage jobs.
There is no news outlet that hasnt been bought and paid for by special interests. FOX is one of the main reasons I became an Independent.
Vote out the Teabaggers and expand Medicaid in the states while also having state exchanges. Premiums are much lower in the states with the state exchanges because it fosters competition. The problem is not the ACA. It is the opposition to it that has created a lot of the issues. It is also here to stay.
Jimmy, what you said.
Wow, biased much?
No more so than someone who disagrees with me on ideological grounds. We’ve all got our biases, some just make more sense than others. But thanks for reading!